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Bulletin, October/November 2008

Inside ASIS&T

Balloting Ends for New ASIS&T Officer and Directors

As this issue of the Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science and Technology is prepared for electronic publication, the balloting is ending for the election of 2009 president-elect and two directors-at-large on the Board. Full results of the election will be available at the ASIS&T website when all ballots have been counted and certified.

Running for the presidency of ASIS&T, to take office at the Annual Meeting later this month as president-elect, are
Harry Bruce and Gary Marchionini. Four candidates are vying for two open slots as directors-at-large:
Victor Rosenberg, Jens-Erik Mai, Deborah Barreau and Peter Morville.

Candidates for President-Elect
Harry Bruce is a professor and dean of the Information School of the University of Washington. Previously, he was a faculty member at the University of Technology in Sydney. His work on human information behavior looks to develop a deeper understanding of how people need, seek and use information in their professional and everyday lives. The new knowledge generated by this research is used to inform the development or enhancement of resources, services and technologies that facilitate information access and use. Harry is a recipient of the ASIS&T UMI Doctoral Dissertation award; he has served as a member of the
JASIST editorial board for the past 11 years.

Gary Marchionini is the Cary C. Boshamer Professor of Information Science in the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Previously he was professor in the College of Library and Information Services at the University of Maryland (1983-1998). He teaches classes in human-information interaction, HCI and digital libraries. He has served on the ASIS&T Board of Directors, on a variety of ASIS&T standing and ad hoc committees and on the editorial board of
JASIST. Along with Vic Rosenberg and Lou Rosenfeld, he co-chaired the first ASIS&T IA Summit. He has been honored with the ASIS&T Research Award and has twice won the
JASIST Best Paper Award.

Candidates for Directors-at-large, 2009-2011 (2 Positions)
Victor Rosenberg is a professor in the School of Information at the University of Michigan. Before coming to the University of Michigan, he was a professor at the University of California at Berkeley. He also served for one year as a professor of library science at the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais in Brazil. His broad research interests include electronic commerce, information retrieval, information policy and entrepreneurship. His current work is a project using games to teach undergraduates to do effective online research. Rosenberg was the founder and first CEO of Personal Bibliographic Software, Inc., the developer of ProCite and BiblioLink software products.

Jens-Erik Mai is vice dean and associate professor in the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto, following stints at the University of Washington and the Royal School of Library and Information Science in Denmark. His research interests lie at the intersection of classification, information and human activities. He has published on conceptual and methodological issues in the organization and representation of information. He joined ASIS&T as a student in the early 1990s. He is past chair of SIG/Classification Research (SIG/CR), has chaired the annual SIG/CR Workshop, been a member of the SIG Cabinet Steering Committee and has served on the program committee for the Annual Meeting.

Deborah Barreau is associate professor in the School of Information and Library Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Previously she taught at Catholic University in Washington, DC, and was a systems analyst with Aspen Systems Corporation. Her research interests include personal information management, organizational behavior and the changing roles of information professionals. She teaches courses in human information interaction and organizational behavior. She won the ASIS&T/ISI Outstanding Information Science Teacher Award in 2002. She is past-chair of SIG/DL, and she has served on juries for the Cretsos Award, Doctoral Dissertation Award and Outstanding Information Science Teacher Award.

Peter Morville, widely recognized as a founder of the information architecture field, is co-author of the best-selling
Information Architecture for the World Wide Web and author of Ambient Findability. He is a founder and past president of the Information Architecture Institute, and he has served on several advisory boards including the group charged with revising the ANSI/NISO Z39.19 standard for monolingual controlled vocabularies. As president of Semantic Studios, Peter consults with corporations, libraries, universities and nonprofits to improve the information architecture of their systems.

News from ASIS&T SIGs
SIG/USE presented its 2008 Outstanding Contributions to Information Behavior Award to
Reijo Savolainen, professor in the Department of Information Studies at the University of Tampere, Finland. The award recognizes scholars who contribute in an outstanding way to the development of the information behavior research field. Savolainen’s empirical and theoretical research into information seeking and related practices has furthered our understanding of information practices.

News from ASIS&T Chapters
The New England ASIS&T (NEASIS&T) Chapter selected two winners for the annual Student Travel Award. Jodi
Schneider, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, author of “FRBRizing MARC Records with the FRBR Display Tool,” and
Jaime Snyder, Syracuse University, author of “Image-Enabled Discourse: Towards an Exploratory Analytic Framework,” will each receive up to $750 to help defray the costs of attending the 2008 ASIS&T Annual Meeting in Columbus.
Leslie Donnell, Beatrice Pulliam and Christine Quirion comprised this year’s award jury.

The Carolinas Chapter of ASIS&T (cc:asis&t) focused on Pushing Boundaries in Information Visualization: Using Virtual, Immersive and Interactive Technologies in Research & Practice for a one-day workshop in mid-September. A number of researchers demonstrated ways in which they have taken advantage of current technologies to manage their collaborative projects and to share research data. The program featured a mix of research projects ranging from electrical stimulation of the nervous system with cochlear implant to scalable visualization of genealogy links, experiential look at the death penalty, visualizing activity on a busy website and comparing human and yeast cell protein interaction networks.

The Northern Ohio ASIS&T (NORASIST) Chapter will feature Ed
Dale, program manager at Ernst & Young, discussing How Does Enterprise Search Work? at the group’s annual meeting in early October. The program will focus on what is behind search engines and how research studies can improve results.

Thanks from the Wisconsin Chapter
Thank you all for your support of last year’s successful book donation at the ASIS&T Annual Meeting. In total, we collected 158 books related to information management, storage, retrieval, organization and ethics. Of the books donated, 72 came from ASIS&T meeting participants and publishers (Springer, in particular), and 86 were donated by the publication office of the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (special thanks go to Marlo Welshons, assistant dean). The books have been successfully delivered to the East African School of Library and Information Science, Makerere University, Uganda
(http://easlis.mak.ac.ug/). The School of Information Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee covered the mailing and processing costs for the delivery. Thanks again to all.

News about ASIS&T Members
Amanda Spink, professor of information technology at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia, has been elected as a fellow of the Queensland Academy of Arts and Sciences. This prestigious award is given to QAAS member professors in recognition of their outstanding contributions to their scientific fields.

“How to Be a User Experience Team of One,” an article by Leah Buley in the August/September 2008 issue of the
Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, was selected as an Editor’s Pick in the September issue of Informed Librarian Online. Each month, the online publication links directly to the latest table of contents of more than 300 journals with links to the full-text articles as available, and also chooses a few articles that it wishes to highlight for its thousands of readers.

Institutional Member News
Florida State University’s Information Use Management & Policy Institute, directed by
Charles R. McClure, Francis Eppes Professor at the College of Information, has received a grant of more than $200,000 to assist public libraries and local communities better plan for and respond to hurricanes. The project designed by the institute calls for working with the State Library and Archives of Florida, SOLINET and the state’s multi-type library cooperatives and public libraries, as well as federal, state, local and community agencies concerned with Florida hurricane preparedness and response. While public libraries have provided a range of useful hurricane and disaster preparation and response services and activities, this project will be the first systematic effort to identify and organize resources, services, activities, guidelines and best practices.

UNC Attracts World-Renowned Data Research Team
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) is the new home of the world-renowned Data Intensive Cyber Environments (DICE) group, long of the University of California, San Diego's Supercomputer Center.

The research team will hold appointments in UNC's School of Information and Library Science with research space in Chapel Hill's Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI). The award-winning research group brings expertise in development of digital data technologies, including open source software that enables sharing of data in collaborative research, publication of data in digital libraries and preservation of data in persistent archives for use by future generations, along with a research portfolio exceeding $10 million.

"The DICE group will function as a magnet for students and collaborators," said
José-Marie Griffiths, school dean. "The group will help us further extend the research computing infrastructure at UNC that will benefit us all, improve our capacity and capability to conduct larger-scale research projects, while inspiring new generations of students to understand that considerable attention and deliberate effort are needed to ensure both effective and long-term access to information."

Group members will interact with colleagues in the school and other campus units on academic digital library and preservation research efforts, initially focusing on current collaborations such as the National Archives and Records Administration Transcontinental Persistent Archive Prototype and the National Science Foundation Software Development for Cyberinfrastructure project, along with others such as the Library of Congress Video Archiving project.

Simmons College Adds New Faculty
The Simmons College Graduate School of Library and Information Science (GSLIS) has added four new members to its faculty.

The new faculty members are Ross Harvey, a specialist in the preservation of library and archival materials;
Howard Rodriguez-Mori, a specialist in reference and user services; Lisa
Hussey, a specialist in diversity and management in librarianship; and Melanie A.
Kimball, a specialist in youth services and literature. Rodriguez-Mori, Hussey and Kimball join the faculty as assistant professors. Harvey will be a visiting faculty member for two years.

Harvey was most recently a professor of library and information management at Charles Sturt University in Australia. Rodriguez-Mori has taught library science courses at several institutions, including University of Arizona, University of Denver, Wayne State University and Florida State University. Hussey, previously director of library services at DeVry University in Arizona, has taught at the University of British Columbia and the University of Missouri, and served as program manager for the University of Arizona School of Information Resources and Library Science. Kimball is an assistant professor at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York.